Economic Revitalization
Tracking downtown revitalization
Since the onset of COVID-19, DSA has been tracking the impact on our local economy. As downtown bounces back, we continue to follow dozens of metrics to trace the path to full economic recovery. A few of these metrics are below.
Downtown Revitalization Dashboard
August 2025 (July data)
Downtown Seattle was the first American urban center to experience the impacts of COVID-19, enduring a sudden economic downturn. As downtown continues to evolve, DSA will publish a monthly Revitalization Dashboard examining key metrics. The data sets provide a comparison point to the same time period in 2019. Additionally, the dashboard will feature notable stories that provide context regarding downtown’s renewal and reemergence.
Please credit the Downtown Seattle Association Revitalization Dashboard for use of charts, data and images on this page.
Unique monthly visitors compared to 2019
More than 3.2 million unique visitors came downtown in July 2025. This represents 97% of the visitors seen in July 2019.
Average weekday worker foot traffic
In July, downtown’s worker foot traffic was 66% of July 2019’s daily average — the highest rate since February 2020. This figure represents more than 154,000 daily worker visits in July 2025, and a 7% increase from July 2024.
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
Preliminary figures show that there were more than 420,700 downtown hotel rooms sold in July 2025. This figure represents 105% of rooms sold in July 2019, and also a 3% YoY growth in rooms sold compared to July 2024.
Quarterly
In July, the number of occupied apartment units downtown continued growing, rising to nearly 60,500. This represents a 4% increase compared to Q3 2024 and a 20% increase compared to Q3 2019.
Of Note in Downtown
In July 2025, three different days surpassed this level of visits. July 26 marked the highest volume of foot traffic with more than 671,000 people — this was the evening of a Morgan Wallen concert at Lumen Field and the Seafair Torchlight Parade. Prior to this month, there was only one other month (July 2023 — the Taylor Swift/MLB All-Star Week) that had reached this level since March 2020.
In the downtown core (SPD sector M), incidents of violent crime declined 51% in July 2025 compared to the same period in 2024 primarily due to a sharp drop in aggravated assaults.
In just a little more than a month (from July 1 to Aug. 12) 11 new retailers or restaurants opened in the MID service area. That’s more than double the amount of openings (5) from May 1 to June 30.
Coming Up in Downtown
The postseason push continues at T-Mobile Park. The surging Seattle Mariners — near the top of AL West at the time of publication — welcome division foes Oakland and San Diego for a six-game homestand Aug. 22–27.
The signature downtown summer festival returns to Seattle Center later this month. Bumbershoot, two full days of art, culture, comedy and music will fill the Uptown neighborhood Aug. 30–31. More than 50,000 attendees are expected.
Gaming takes over the downtown core. PAX West will bring thousands of people to the Seattle Convention Center’s Arch and Summit Buildings to celebrate all things gaming and gaming culture Aug. 29–Sept. 1. In addition, there will be a block party with food trucks, a beer garden and live music on Ninth Avenue between Pine and Pike streets Aug. 29–Sept. 1.
COVID-19 Downtown Recovery Weekly Snapshot
These charts show weekly statistics from March 2020 through the most recent week available. To indicate the level of recovery, data is displayed as a percent of the same metric for the comparable week of 2019.
Notes on Sources
Downtown foot traffic data are provided by Placer.ai and are based on cell phone location data. Each person is counted once per day. International visitors are not included. Subsets of this data in the charts are as follows:
- Office worker presence is estimated based on visits by workers who were present between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays in downtown Seattle.*
- Hotel data are based on monthly reports from STR, provided by Visit Seattle.
- Apartment occupancy data are from CoStar. This is reported quarterly but the current quarter data are updated in real-time as new information is added to the database.
- Domestic visitors counts those who do not live or work downtown.
- Total foot traffic includes all visits to downtown by domestic visitors, residents and workers.
- Pike Place Market visitors includes domestic visitors who do not live or work at the Pike Place Market.
*Note that workers who have not visited their work site in the past 90 days are classified as “visitors” until they are regularly visiting their work site at least three times in a one-week period.